On Wednesday, French President Emmanuel Macron led a national tribute to the school teacher who was beheaded after showing caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad in class as part of a lesson on free speech, The Wall Street Journal reported.

Samuel Paty was posthumously granted France's highest award, the Legion d'Honneur, & commemorated in the national ceremony at the Sorbonne University in Paris.

Speaking during the ceremony, President Emmanuel Macron called Paty "the face of the Republic," eulogising a man whose "apartment was a library" & whose "greatest gifts were books."

A news agency quoted Macron as saying, "We all have, in our hearts, in our memories, a teacher who changed the course of our existence," Macron said. "You know, this teacher who taught us to read, to count, to have confidence in ourselves. This teacher who not only passed on knowledge to us but opened a path for us".

He added that "Samuel Paty was one of those," he said, "one of those teachers who will not be forgotten, of these enthusiasts capable of spending nights learning history, a teacher who questioned himself a thousand times, as he did for a course on freedom of expression & freedom of conscience that he had been preparing since July".

Last week, history teacher Paty was beheaded by an eighteen-year-old teenager on the outskirts of Paris after he showed cartoons depicting the prophet Muhammad during a lesson.

This apparently prompted outrage among some Muslim parents. The killer, a French citizen of Chechen descent, was subsequently shot dead by police.

The Govt has ordered the dissolution of the Sheikh Yassin Islamist association, whose founder, Abdelhakim Sefrioui, is currently in custody as a suspect in the case of the brutal killing of a history teacher in Paris, French Govt spokesman Gabriel Attal said on Wednesday.

An inquiry is still underway, with Sefrioui & six other suspects being probed on various related charges.
Shutting down groups spreading ideas linked to radical Islam is part of an urgent effort declared by Macron to fight the spread of religious radicalism in France.

The Govt also ordered a mosque in the Paris suburb of Pantin to close for 6 months for having shared on FB a video calling for action against Paty. The mosque deleted the video & expressed regret.

"There's no room for violence in our religion," the Pantin mosque said Monday in a FB statement.

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